As a company that is obsessed with meeting and exceeding the expectations of our customers, we are compelled to take meaningful action today that deliver both immediate and future benefits to Australia and New Zealand, and their communities. We also know it is important to lead by example—not only delivering on the commitments we’ve made, but continually looking for new ways to contribute to the areas where we live and work. Amazon’s sustainability commitment, and today’s announcement that Amazon is the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy to date, will help us continue on our path to being 100% powered by renewable energy. While keeping our customers at the centre of every decision we make, we can innovate faster and make our products more efficient to drive sustainable outcomes.
To date, Amazon has 127 global renewable energy projects, including 59 utility-scale wind and solar projects and 68 solar rooftops on fulfilment centres and sort centres around the globe, which produce more than 6,500MW (MW) of renewable energy each year. Included in these projects are Amazon’s now three investments in Australia: a new project we announced today, the Hawkesdale Wind Farm, Victoria; Gunnedah Solar Farm, New South Wales; and Suntop Solar Farm in New South Wales. Combined, these projects will generate 717,000 MWh or renewable energy annually, the equivalent to the annual electricity of almost 115,000 average Australian homes. Our continued investment in Australian renewable energy projects are not only helping make our business, and our future, more sustainable, it’s also helping to create investment and jobs in regional Australia, both during construction of these projects and long-term employment when they are operational.
In 2019, we co-founded The Climate Pledge with Global Optimism, a not-for-profit, which champions social and environmental change. The Climate Pledge asks organisations to commit to achieving net-zero carbon by 2040—a decade ahead of the goals set in 2015 by the Paris Agreement. We are delighted that other leading global organisations, including Uber, Siemens, Verizon, Infosys, Reckitt Benckiser, Mercedes-Benz, Henkel, and Signify, have now signed on to The Climate Pledge. Our path to net-zero carbon emissions requires us to achieve a series of milestones, including powering our operations with 100 per cent renewable energy. We’ve also announced The Climate Pledge Fund to support the development of sustainable and decarbonising technologies and services that will enable Amazon and other companies to meet the goals set by The Climate Pledge.
A bold approach is required across all industries to create a more sustainable world. To demonstrate what is possible with innovation, we are collaborating with the energy industry to provide them with access to the latest cloud technology. For example, in July, AWS announced a multi-year strategic alliance with Vector, one of New Zealand’s largest energy companies, to jointly develop the New Energy Platform (NEP). Powered by AWS, the NEP is an Internet of Things (IoT) and analytics solution for the energy industry, to help deliver more affordable, reliable, and cleaner energy options to consumers. The initial focus of the NEP is to enable Vector to offer its retailer customers (who are customers of Vector Metering) a better and faster understanding of how their customers consume energy.
By increasing the capacity and rate of data collection, the NEP is designed to help Vector deliver advanced meter processing from 30 minutes to five-minute intervals in Australia by 2021, which will enable energy and utility companies to develop innovative solutions and new market models, enabling market innovation. The NEP will facilitate this by leveraging AWS IoT Analytics, a fully-managed service that makes it easy to run and operationalise sophisticated analytics on massive volumes of data. In the future, this will provide the option for energy and utility companies to gain insights on network performance and energy consumption to help deliver benefits to consumers through enabling customer-centric energy network planning, smarter investment decisions, and increasing reliability for consumers.
We are committed to running our business in the most environmentally friendly way possible, and our commitments and investments not only enable us to achieve what our customers expect from us but provide an example for other organisations to follow. We invite any company who wants to join The Climate Pledge to talk to us about what we might be able to achieve together. Solving the world’s environmental and sustainability challenges is a task that no single organisation can take on alone, but working together, we can make a significant impact.
